Woman testifies about torture suffered under Saddam’s regime

Nancy A. Youssef, Knight… Woman testifies about torture suffered under Saddam’s regime

Nancy A. Youssef, Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq – In a proceeding that’s been punctuated by antics and outbursts, the first witness Tuesday during Saddam Hussein’s trial did something that even the judge has been unable to do: She silenced the defendants.

The woman, who was identified only as Witness A, gave her testimony in a box covered by a beige curtain, her face visible only to the judge and the prosecution. Her voice was digitally altered to protect her identity.

As she spoke, the courtroom sat silent and listened to her describe being tortured at the hands of the former regime.

It was the fourth day of the trial, but it was the first session that drew attention largely to the prosecution’s case rather than the defense’s noisy efforts to stall the proceedings. In all, five witnesses testified.

Although the witnesses told compelling stories and blamed Saddam for their suffering, none presented evidence directly linking the former dictator to the killings of nearly 150 people in the city of Dujail, as he’s charged with in this case.

By the end of the nine-hour session, Saddam was threatening not to show up for Wednesday’s hearing, complaining that he hadn’t been allowed to change his clothes and underwear in three days.

Saddam and seven co-defendants are charged with ordering the killings shortly after a 1982 assassination attempt on the former dictator. If convicted, they could be executed.

The five witnesses largely told the same story, anonymously. They said they weren’t part of the assassination attempt but were nonetheless summoned by Saddam’s henchmen. They said they were questioned and tortured before they were imprisoned at Abu Ghraib for two years.

In a city split and sinking before storm, racial issues boil

Lee Hancock, The Dallas Morning News

NEW ORLEANS – The tensions of race have always defined the best and worst of this city, from its rich cuisine and bon-temps culture to its entrenched poverty, epidemic violence and economic decline.

With the city beginning its fourth month of struggle after Hurricane Katrina, many residents say their future hinges on bridging race and class divisions that many say had gotten deeper, uglier and angrier in the months before the storm.

“We’re very fractured, and we have been for a long time, throughout our history,” said Lawrence Powell, a professor of Southern history at Tulane University.

“The city prior to Katrina in terms of race, class and poverty was a man-made disaster. It’s one of the poorest big cities in the country,” said Powell, who is white. “The economic foundations were rotting away. The main growth industry was tourism, but that’s a Third World wage structure. And the school system was in the toilet.”

The racial divide affects almost every rebuilding question: which neighborhoods will be rebuilt and when; how public housing will be reconstructed; how to protect the city from future disasters; and who will call the shots – the white-dominated business community, black politicians or outsiders.

“I think we can get this done, but I think politically it’s going to be a tremendous challenge in a place where racial relations were so strained,” said Michael Cowan, a white Loyola University psychologist who chairs the city’s human relations commission. “If the whole doesn’t recover, then there’s no part that will be able to recover and flourish, and at some level, we all know that.”

Mayor Ray Nagin has said that the city’s population – 451,000 and 68 percent black before the storm – hovers around 100,000 and could initially stabilize at half its pre-storm size.

German citizen held in secret prison sues ex-CIA director

Frank Davies and Warren P. Strobel, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – A German citizen whom the CIA abducted from Macedonia and held in a secret prison in Afghanistan for five months sued former CIA Director George Tenet on Tuesday, saying he’d been tortured.

“I want an apology, and I want to know why this happened to me,” Khaled al-Masri said during a video hookup from Germany. “What happened to me was outside the bounds of any legal framework and should never be allowed to happen to anyone else.”

Al-Masri’s lawsuit, filed by ACLU lawyers in Alexandria, Va., sheds light on the CIA’s secret practice of “extraordinary renditions,” using special teams to capture suspected terrorists and transport them to countries that practice torture or to one of the agency’s reported secret prisons in Eastern Europe or Asia.

Questions about al-Masri’s treatment dominated Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s visit Tuesday to Germany, where the case has put intense public pressure on the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Rice defends U.S. handling of terror suspects

Warren P. Strobel, Knight Ridder Newspapers

BERLIN – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday rejected European criticism of how the United States handles terrorist suspects, saying the war against terrorism requires using “every lawful weapon,” but insisting that the Bush administration doesn’t sanction torture.

Rice acknowledged that U.S. intelligence agencies transport detainees to third countries for questioning, a practice known as “rendition,” but she said “the United States does not transport, and has not transported, detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture.”

U.S. officials, human rights experts and news reports, however, said that the United States has taken terror suspects to a number of countries that use torture, according to the State Department’s own human rights reports.

The suspects have included Ibn Shaikh al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda operative, who, under questioning, provided bogus information on Iraqi chemical weapons training for the terrorist network, and was returned to Egypt.

The State Department’s 2004 human rights report on Egypt said that despite legal safeguards, “there were numerous, credible reports that security forces tortured and mistreated detainees.”

Blog postings result in student’s suspension, loss of credits

Megan Twohey, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MILWAUKEE – A dental student at Marquette University has been suspended for the rest of the academic year and ordered to repeat a semester after a committee of professors, administrators and students determined that he violated professional conduct codes when he posted negative comments about unnamed students and professors on a blog.

Scott Taylor, the student’s attorney, said his client, a 22-year-old in Marquette’s School of Dentistry, was brought before the committee for a conduct hearing last week after a classmate complained about his blog, a Web site that contained musings about topics ranging from his education to videogames and drinking.

The focus of the hearing, Taylor said, was half a dozen postings, including one describing a professor as “a [expletive] of a teacher” and another that described 20 classmates as having the “intellectual maturity of a 3-year-old.”

Taylor released what he said was a complete transcript of the blog, which is no longer available online. Taylor said the student did not want to be identified, and his name could not be confirmed.